Interesting, Ged. Cheers.

Every experiment with day/night first class cricket in England, be it the test match or the county championship round, has been freezing cold and therefore very off-putting at night.

If you want bang slap in the middle of the summer, when there’s a better chance of warm evenings, the nights are long here in England making the “glorious floodlit” effect marginal or even irrelevant. There are floodlight restrictions for some grounds, but those are almost as irrelevant as the lighting the emanates from the floodlights for much of the summer. Even Lord’s has managed to convince the local authorities to release the restrictions, given that the concerns were really about noise/crowds at night more than the lights themselves. My guess is that most locals (other than those who like cricket) wouldn’t even notice most county championship days, with the hundreds (or low thousands) drifting in and out throughout the day.

I think floodlit day/night first class cricket has a future pretty much everywhere in the cricketing world except England (& perhaps New Zealand).

The commercial viability of first class cricket in England (& elsewhere) I think is a separate point, Bail-out.

Maybe it’s weird that we’re seeing innovation applied to Tests without thoroughly honing the format through experimentation in the domestic game, but it also tells us something a bit sad about first-class cricket, I think – that it’s now deemed so uncommercial that it’s not even worth the potential boost. Just seems to be accepted first-class competition is financially pretty much a write-off whose primary purpose is to develop Test players for Team England (and suspect something similar elsewhere in the world), with a sideline of maintaining a hallowed tradition and giving the players something to do between limited-over fundraisers. Cricket in county whites feels more akin to a historical sport recreation society, rather than a potentially dynamic, sellable product that’s due a modern-life-friendly refresh. (Are many county grounds under local restrictions for how many evenings per year they’re allowed floodlights, and has that been a factor in why the concept’s not really been pursued much further?)

It does feel like this was the first time there was this combination of ball and pitch. It’s weird that Tests are the, um, testing ground.

Very uncomfortable feeling Swantonish. Most disconcerting.

Stokes’ innings was instructive in that he did a lot right and not really very much wrong and was out for 25. We absolutely agree that most of the batsmen could have done more, but that innings did give a sense of the limits of what could be achieved. You’d probably need a good few things to go your way to score much more than that.

It was quite a steep learning curve for a Test match, in terms of presenting players with new conditions to adapt to. With the pink ball in the mix, it seemed quite markedly different from playing on even a normal ‘turner’.

I thought Rohit’s in both innings and Stokes’ batting in the second innings would be good templates for batsmen from both teams – protect your stumps, be unfazed by any spin beating you, use your feet when possible, do not cut pull sweep, yet always look for runs.

A bit like how an earlier generation of batsmen eventually figured out how to play Anil Kumble.

I felt that the batsmen could’ve used their feet more, Axar for instance playing in his second test was hammering away at the exact same spot all through, England could’ve put pressure on him and asked him to vary his lengths by making use of the crease and coming down the wicket. Pujara does this to Lyon who also likes to plug away in a similar area.

Second, batsmen should’ve put away horizontal shots, there was no cutting or sweeping here if there’s no way to know the eventual line.

Third, batsmen needed to be proactive overall – singles, doubles, aggression – knowing there’s a delivery with their name on it around the corner.

Fourth, also be patient for the lights and dew to come on, making batting that much easier.

This wasn’t a 400 plays 400 wicket, but it was surely not a 110 plays 140 wicket either.

I would say pink ball on a turning wicket adds another puzzle for international batsman, with a big learning curve, but definitely not an unsolvable one, IMO.